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When Vassili Oxenuk sat down with some unhappy investors at San Francisco's Grand Hyatt last May, he noted that they were meeting in the Warfield Room. "This is a war between you and me," said the burly Russian émigré, according to one investor's notes. "I have hired guns to handle situations for me.…I can call them anytime."

Talk of guns, say his investors, was strange to hear from the previously charming graduate of a prestigious Moscow math academy who later worked in Russian intelligence. Oxenuk had started out witty and solicitous, claiming to have raised hundreds of millions of dollars in the U.S. for wealthy clients from Kazakhstan and families of some of Ukraine's political leaders. When Oxenuk promised to double their money in a year, the investors say they believed him.

However, former investors, partners, and employees told Barron's that Oxenuk revealed a tougher side when investors wanted their money back. Nearly all were afraid to speak on the record, citing their personal embarrassment over the losses, his threats, and photos of Oxenuk with assault weapons on Facebook and in a Russian business magazine.

Oxenuk, 48, denies that he has ever defrauded or threatened anyone. Guns are a hobby to him, nothing more, he says. In Skype interviews interpreted by his wife or by his secretary, the onetime spy-agency employee told Barron's that the complaints about him are likely a Soviet-style "black p.r." campaign, coordinated by ex-associates who want revenge for soured deals. Specifically, he says, they're trying to undermine an investment conference for Russian entrepreneurs he advertised as scheduled for April 1 at the Wynn Las Vegas Resort. Last Thursday, the Wynn told Barron's that no such conference was scheduled. Reached on Friday, Oxenuk said he'd changed the conference into a membership club for foreign entrepreneurs who agreed to pay him $2,000 a year for advice on how to raise money in the U.S. for their businesses. He added that 30 businesses had signed on.

The change in strategy follows some recent disputes between Oxenuk and investors. Some of his Ukrainian investors recently won a $5 million default judgment against him in Las Vegas' federal court. A year ago, other investors complained about him to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Regulators have not accused Oxenuk of any wrongdoing. The losses alleged aren't huge. Investors say they entrusted Oxenuk with less than $10 million; a couple of hundred million dollars in stock-market capitalization has vanished from his failed public ventures. Oxenuk acknowledges some losses but argues they weren't his fault. The investor complaints, however, do underscore the risks of investing across borders with funds sent via offshore channels to unregistered advisors. Neither the SEC nor the FBI would comment for this story.

Oxenuk's tale involves some unusual events he claims have occurred, including his participation in covert operations and a beating by men in military-police gear in Moscow. Some of his autobiographical claims are unverifiable. Barron's pieced together the claims and counterclaims from interviews and documents collected everywhere from Kazakhstan to California.

VASSILI OXENUK GREW UP in a village consisting of eight cottages some 600 miles east of Moscow, near the city of Kirov. A strong performance in a math Olympiad got him into a well-respected Moscow boarding school where the Soviet Union groomed science prodigies. After training at one of Russia's military colleges, Oxenuk says he went to work in 1989 for the GRU, Russia's largest foreign-intelligence agency. Among his tasks, he told Barron's, was to arrange for scientists to help Iran with its uranium-enrichment program.

As Russia's freewheeling capitalism emerged in the 1990s, Oxenuk says he gained business skills by importing TVs and running Moscow nightclubs. To judge by a 2000 SEC filing, he also had begun to learn his way around the financial markets. That year, he took his British Virgin Islands–based company, Oxir Investments, public onto the U.S. over-the-counter market by merging it into a 77-year-old California shell company. Oxir marketed itself as a play on Russia's rousing growth and combined Oxenuk's small-time ventures in asset management, real estate, and online retailing.

Oxir wasn't much of a business. At year-end 2000, it remained a penny stock with a U.S. stock-market valuation of just $20 million. In its roughly 2½-year corporate history to that point, it had generated just $250,000 in sales, according to its filings.

The former spy's enterprise attracted some notable investors. Oxir's September 2000 annual report showed 24% of the shares held by E.C. Venture Capital, an entity controlled by Vladimir N. Kishenin, a former KGB colonel who had run the USSR's electronic intelligence program before becoming a wealthy investor during the 1990s. Oxenuk was E.C. Venture's Russian president at the time, he told Barron's.

After Oxenuk's departure from E.C. Venture, its Swiss unit gained notoriety when several European nations seized its bank accounts in a money-laundering investigation of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. No charges were ever brought against Kuchma, Kishenin, or E.C. Venture. Barron's tried repeatedly to contact Kishenin, but was unable to reach him through available phone numbers and Internet addresses.

In November 2001, according to a Moscow police report, some men with machine guns and riot-police outfits blocked Oxenuk's car front and back, then made Oxenuk and his two bodyguards lie on the ground. After beating them, the masked cops threw a hood over Oxenuk's head and dragged him into a forest where they broke his ribs. They then robbed him of $1,500 and left him there.

A year later, Oxenuk says he was wrongly convicted of financial crimes and sentenced to seven years in prison. With the help of friends, Oxenuk says he was able to get out of prison and leave the country.

Resettled in Las Vegas in 2004, Oxenuk renewed his entrepreneurial activities. Not only was he cited in the Russian press as a U.S. stock-market expert, but he also became the exclusive distributor of Peep One and Aphrodite Love, drinks that claimed an aphrodisiac effect. His investment-advisory business offered a dozen specialized portfolios.

Oxenuk also became active in the burgeoning business of bringing foreign businesses onto the U.S. stock market by engineering their "reverse takeovers" by publicly traded shell companies. This controversial technique allows private companies to become public without going through the disclosures entailed in an initial public offering (See "Beware This Chinese Export," Aug. 28, 2010).

In 2005, Oxenuk tapped into a circle of prominent Ukrainians by meeting Eduard Lozovskyy, a businessman and politician from Lugansk, a Russian-speaking industrial center. Lozovskyy is a long-time acquaintance and associate of Oleksandr Yefremov, whose Party of the Regions held the largest bloc of seats in the national parliament. Today, Yefremov is his party's parliamentary leader.

A September 2012 stock-fraud complaint filed by Lozovskyy and his fellow investors in a Las Vegas federal court says Lozovskyy gave Oxenuk $250,000 to invest and in 2006 introduced him to his party friends. Yefremov's son sent Oxenuk $1 million, and the children of two other party leaders gave an additional $2 million, according to the complaint. In an interview with Barron's, Oxenuk claimed that the investments were made on behalf of the politicians and arrived as wire transfers from obscure offshore corporations, prompting U.S. financial institutions to freeze the accounts. The Ukrainians' Washington-based lawyer, Dmitri Dubograev, counters that Oxenuk's claim is "absurd." The money was not laundered, he says.

LOZOVSKYY'S COMPLAINT ALLEGED separately that he gave Oxenuk money to establish a publicly held presence in the U.S. for TBM Holdings, the holding company for Lozovskyy's collection of Ukrainian financial, industrial, and real-estate businesses. A registration statement was filed with the SEC in September 2007, but Lozovskyy's complaint notes that it was withdrawn a month later.

The Ukrainian investors say in their fraud complaint that Oxenuk had reported a 17% return on their $3 million for the three months ended July 2006. Then he stopped reporting. When the investors asked for an accounting, says the complaint, Oxenuk told Lozovskyy that a brokerage firm had blocked their trading accounts on suspicions of money laundering. Even after they supplied him with proof of their money's origins, they say Oxenuk kept putting them off. In 2010, says the complaint, Oxenuk told Lozovskyy that the investors would soon get double their money back because Oxenuk had gotten a piece of Kazakhstan's leading supermarket chain, SM Market.

Indeed, after a chance encounter in Las Vegas with a member of one of the country's leading families, Oxenuk had met some of Kazakhstan's richest and most powerful people, according to those who escorted him around the country. A petrochemical mogul gave him $1.5 million to invest. And Kenges Rakishev, son-in-law of a former prime minister, tapped Oxenuk to find U.S. ventures for his construction and chemical conglomerate, SAT & Co. (ticker: SATC.Kazakhstan). The press paid court. "I've lived my life as an investor surrounded by false information," Oxenuk told the Kazakh publication Business & Power in 2009. "I am a mathematician who believes only the bare facts and figures."

Kazakh investors say that Oxenuk suggested they send their money to his British Virgin Islands corporation, which he would then invest in his own name on their behalf. Other investors, in Russia and the U.S., say they got similar instructions. Oxenuk denies this method of delivery was his idea. In any event, the result is a lack of documentation about some transactions.

ANYONE WHO SEEMS TO have succeeded in the U.S. is revered in Kazakhstan, says Soledad Bayazit. A trained economist, Bayazit aspired to run a business. After meeting Oxenuk, she introduced him to the controlling shareholder of SM Market—an entrepreneur named Edgar Salduzi—and suggested that Oxenuk could raise capital for the supermarket chain with a Nasdaq stock offering. Salduzi agreed to merge the supermarkets into a U.S.-registered shell company, via a reverse takeover, while giving Oxenuk 40% of the business for his services.

As his reverse-merger activities picked up speed, Oxenuk formed the Oxenuk Equity Fund in the U.S. to invest in the deals he was assembling. He took in half a million dollars from a wealthy Russian-American and gained the attention of a group of American alumni from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology—informally known as Phystech, the prestigious alma mater of Russian Nobel laureates and computer entrepreneurs.

Oxenuk eventually talked to about a dozen Phystech grads, most of whom were working in the U.S. financial and software communities. They composed an informal network that alerted each other to business opportunities, and invested individual amounts ranging from $1,500 to $150,000 in the Oxenuk Equity Fund.

A Silicon Valley alum of Phystech who invested $120,000 in the fund—at what he was told was $5 a share—huddled with Oxenuk's aide Fedor Sannikov to appraise the fund's holdings. Sannikov came up with a value of $20 a share, counting Oxenuk Equity's purported holdings in the Kazakh conglomerate SAT & Co., a gold mine, and most importantly, the 40% share of the U.S.-listed
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(ARGB) that would result from the planned reverse-merger with SM Market. Sannikov declined to comment.

As 2011 began, Salduzi and Bayazit were adding to SM Market's stores around Kazakhstan in anticipation of a $20 million infusion—to be followed by another $80 million—that they say Oxenuk promised. They arranged a $1.2 million line of credit for Oxenuk to pay lawyers and investment bankers like John Leo, whose tiny firm Primary Capital had arranged several Chinese reverse mergers onto the U.S. stock market. On a visit to New York, Bayazit says she was dazzled when Oxenuk introduced her around the fancy Manhattan offices of an investment bank. She says he also boasted that he was a co-owner of Primary Capital.

"We were like rabbits hypnotized by the snake," Bayazit told Barron's. Oxenuk disputes her accounts and says his agreement with Leo was a share of revenues on transactions and not co-ownership.

Oxenuk never came through with the money for SM Market, even after the grocery's reverse-merger became effective in February 2011. Shares of American Retail Group floated up to $9, which valued the business at $190 million. But with just 900 shares changing hands each day, that valuation seems unreliable. As shelves ran empty in the cash-strapped Kazakh supermarkets, Bayazit and Salduzi started to get suspicious and had the impression that Oxenuk disliked their meeting lawyers, accountants, or bankers outside his presence. But in the spring of 2011, they managed to meet Primary Capital's Leo alone in Kazakhstan. They asked if Oxenuk indeed was a co-owner of the investment bank. Leo said he wasn't.

OXENUK ARRIVED LATER that day and arguments ensued. Bayazit says Oxenuk warned her and Leo that he knew where they lived. In another meeting, she says he threatened to call Moscow and bring down an army of gunmen. When recently interviewed by Barron's, Oxenuk denied making any threats and said he's being blamed for what was simply an unsuccessful business venture that occurred while he was sidelined by cancer. He claimed, in turn, that Bayazit had saddled the supermarkets with unserviceable debt by forging his signature on high-interest bank loans when he was out sick. In his June 2011 letter resigning from the American Retail Group's board, Oxenuk alleged that "materially false information regarding the company's operations has been provided to me and publicly distributed by the company." To Barron's, Bayazit denied Oxenuk's accusations.

American Retail Group's merger with the Kazakh grocer was rescinded the next month, and trading in the U.S.-listed entity dried up. When the stock last traded, on Feb. 8, just 100 shares changed hands at 31 cents.

Once the Phystech alums learned about the collapse of American Retail Group, and with it the value of their investment in Oxenuk Equity Fund, they began to question their belief in Oxenuk. Further research by the Phystech group revealed that in 2007 the SEC had revoked the registration of Oxir Investments, Oxenuk's original U.S. vehicle, after the company had gone five years without filing the required periodic reports.

That prompted last May's unhappy get-together at the Warfield Room. Oxenuk insists he did the investors no wrong and urged them to stick with the investment fund, which he would soon replenish with new reverse-merger deals. "My plan was to file a registration statement for the Oxenuk Equity Fund to become a public company," he told Barron's. "Then I would've become a very rich person myself."

Members of the Phystech group say Oxenuk alternated his blandishments with the threats about guns and hit men. The Phystech alums say the Oxenuk fiasco ruined what had been a generous funding network for start-ups. The Kazakh supermarket chain has closed, and investors in that country are considering a lawsuit. Ukrainian investors are still trying to collect their $5 million default judgment from Oxenuk.

In a court examination about his assets, Oxenuk said he was broke but did own about 10 guns, including a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a sniper rifle that he keeps under his bed. "And anybody who's trying to take it is going to deal with it," he told his examiners through an interpreter.